Appreciating the culture of drink one sip at a time

Ever since the surprising success of my peach brandy a few months ago, I’ve been curious to try making another batch of homemade brandy using a different fruit. After consulting the original peach brandy recipe found in Barbara Holland’s The Joy of Drinking, I wondered: would using another fruit with characteristics similar to peaches – texture and flesh consistency, for example – produce another tasty brandy?

With this question in mind, I decided upon plums as my central ingredient. The small, black-skinned fruit, like a peach, is a stone fruit, both from the genus prunus. Both peaches and plums would react with sugar the same way, I thought. So over the holiday weekend, I took a quick trip to a local international grocery store and returned with roughly six pounds of plums.

I replicated my previous recipe carefully: wash and peel the plums, but do not remove their pits (or as Holland more eloquently states, “do not stone”). Place a layer of whole, peeled plums in the bottom of a half gallon mason jar – four or five plums depending on their size. Scoop ordinary white sugar on the plums until completely covered, then repeat layers of plums and sugar until the jar is full. Cap the jar and store in a cool, dark location for six months. I write the date atop the jar so I’ll remember when to open it; this of course isn’t necessary and is more to satisfy my own obsessive compulsiveness.

Be sure to check back (around November 30) to see whether my experiment with plums produces equally delicious results as the peach brandy created earlier this year. And to make your own peach (or plum) brandy, see my earlier post, Homemade Peach Brandy – complete with a step-by-step pictorial.